Beneath the Black aesthetic: James Baldwin's primer of Black American masculinity

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Andrew Shin, Barbara Hudson

Baldwin's early novel Giovanni's Room dramatizes the consequences of self-deception through the experiences of a young expatriate American who is unable to come to terms with his sexuality. The novel opens with a proleptic image of the end - David, alone in an empty house in the south of France, staring at his reflection in a window pane, through which we learn, interestingly, that he is white, the son of an affluent father. That Baldwin ventriloquizes his story through a white protagonist is instructive, as though Baldwin wishes to distance himself from the autobiographical elements of the novel. Robert Bone suggests that, when Baldwin "attempts a novel of homosexual love, with an all-white cast of characters and a European setting, he simply transposes the moral topography of Harlem to the streets of Paris" (38). Bone's observation, however, elides how this "moral topography" is inflected by race.(13) That David's experiences are largely expatriate underlines the untenability of black homosexuality as a lifestyle in America. David is socially unmarked by virtue of his color, a privilege that Baldwin himself enjoyed to a much greater degree in France than in America, but David's experiences in Paris nonetheless reinforce the web of self-deception that characterizes his life in America.

At its broadest reach, Giovanni's Room asks: What does it mean to be a man? This is the burden from which David takes refuge in flight but cannot escape, and it dominates his reflections on two formative experiences: a homoerotic childhood friendship that he terminates in deference to an internalized cultural homophobia, and his relationship with his parents marked by a sense of filial debt. Through the metaphor of a "cavern" (Giovanni's 15), Baldwin brilliantly condenses David's story as a dead-end, the culde-sac in which we find him at the end of the novel. The cavern of innuendo and rumor refers to the discourse of mortification in which the homosexual is pilloried, but it also symbolizes an intensity of pleasure so acute as to culminate in self-dissolution.

In suppressing his homoerotic impulses, however, David finds no solace in a more conventional heterosexuality, figured here through the activities of a philandering father and the memories of a mother who, Medusa-like, haunt David's dreams: ". . . she figured in my nightmares, blind with worms, her hair as dry as metal and brittle as a twig, straining to press me against her body; that body so putrescent, so sickening soft, that it opened, as I clawed and cried, into a breach so enormous as to swallow me alive" (17). Here, in contrast to the discrete male body, Baldwin presents the maternal body as monstrous, as an amorphous, enveloping softness that devours rather than nurtures. For David, compulsory heterosexuality is not the ground of phallic power but, as with all male infants, is potentially castrating, an orientation that defines his future relationships with women. David's fear of castration occurs, however, not through the process of heterosexual desire and the feelings of inadequacy generated in the presence of the powerful paternal phallus, but through a fear of a demonic female sexuality - the "cavern" transformed into a carnivorous "breach." In this scenario, the dream symbolizes a kind of wish-fulfillment in which David desires not to possess but to inhabit the eroticized female body and experience its dissolution, an untenable subject position in a homophobic culture. Here, Baldwin dramatizes the vexed identity of a man unable to countenance a sexual identity elaborated through the symbolism of the female body, when it is the very condition he desires.(14)